Monday, November 29, 2010

Watch the atheist writer and the former prime minister clash over religion in Toronto.

The full debate between Christopher Hitchens (who I interviewed earlier this year) and Tony Blair is now available to watch online. The pair debated whether religion was a force for good in the world.

So, for the many of you who have already read the full transcript, here are their opening statements. Hitchens begins speaking at 04:58 and Blair begins at 12:26. The reminder of Blair's opening statement is included in the second video, which also features a rebuttal from each man.

In a vote after the debate, 68 per cent of the audience sided with Hitchens and 32 per cent with Blair. Now you've got a chance to make your own mind up.

Christopher Hitchens talks about his cancer (1'5"-1'45"), living day-to-day (1'50"-2'10"), are you terrified of dying of cancer? (2'10"- 3'40"), the pathetic fallacy (3'40-4'35"), does it make you angry? (4'35"- 6'30"), how do you think about life now? (6'30"- 7'30"), Pascals Wager (22' 15"- 25' 30"), do you fear death? (25'30-27'), has it been a life well lived? (27'- 29')

Why Criticism of Religion is Important

What would you like to see & do with the rest of your life? (7'30"-8'5"), why criticising Mother Teresa was important (10'-11'20"), Iraq (12'-14'), conflict between West & Islamofaschism (19'20"-20'20"), conflict between theocracy /totalitarianism & The Enlightenment / freethought (20'20"-21'30"), The Bible, Koran & Torah - works of man made (not divine) fiction (21' - 21'30"), mockery of religion (21'30"-22'15")

Firstly, the term ‘faith’ needs some clarification as it is an everyday word that has several meanings depending on the context in which it is used. The following two main dictionary definitions are given as examples of common usage and understanding:

1. Complete trust or confidence in someone or something: this restores one’s faith in politicians.

2. Strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.

The New Oxford Dictionary of English.

Atheism is solely concerned with religious faith as described in definition 2 above.

Faith is belief without evidence. Particularly in a religious context, it can be belief despite evidence to the contrary. An example of this is faith that God created all life on Earth no more than 6,ooo years ago (Creationism), despite the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and natural selection.

Evidence can be scientifically investigated, supported or refuted. Faith through religious indoctrination or ‘spiritual apprehension’ does not, by its very nature, provide any credible evidence to investigate.

Religious apologists often use faith as evidence for their theistic claims (sometimes referred to as the ‘argument from faith’). This is meaningless. Faith, by its very nature, provides no evidence whatever and exists solely in the mind of the believer.

Atheism’s ultimate goal is the end of religious faith – the false and irrational belief that God exists – and of religion, the social manifestation of faith.

A few people have asked, “Why is such an organization necessary?” or “What are you going to do that other organizations like the National Secular Society (NSS) or British Humanist Society (BHA) aren’t already doing?” It is a fair question, and the main answer to this is that none of the groups mentioned actually promote atheism. They do not, as a matter of course, challenge religions directly, question the validity of the concept of faith, or criticize pronouncements made by the religious institutions. At Atheism, we will be challenging religious claims and the propagation of religious faith.

At the last NSS Annual General Meeting (November 2009), its President, Terry Sanderson, stated that it was not their job to promote atheism and at present there is not an organization that is doing so. He went on to explain that the current non-theistic movement is made up of three “arms”, and we at Atheism have modeled this into a simple Venn diagram as a graphical aid to differentiate where we fit in as an organization (please note this diagram is schematic and not to scale).

Each of the circles represent the following movements:

Secularism is the political movement to separate church and state, and to challenge and remove religious privilege.

Non-Theistic “Lifestances” are more positive “alternatives” to faith and religion, such as humanism, PEARLism, scientism and the like. They promote ethical systems, ways of thinking and ways of life.

Active atheism is the challenging of faith – the belief, in the absence of evidence, that God exists – as a bad thing per se. From this follows the challenging of religion, its doctrines, pronouncements and teachings. Until now there has been no distinctively atheist organization in the UK, which is why this organization has been formed.

At Atheism, we do, by definition, support and promote secularism, and we have common ground with non-theistic “lifestances” – hence the overlap. We will work with their promoting organizations where appropriate. However, we will be doing things that they do not (or will not) do and vice versa.

“Living in the moment really does make people happier,” reported The Guardian.

It said, “people are distracted from the task at hand nearly half of the time and this daydreaming consistently makes them less happy”.

Researchers surveyed people using an iPhone application, asking about their mood, current activity and whether they were focused on the task at hand. People whose mind was wandering to an unpleasant or neutral topic reported that they were less happy than people who were focussed on what they were doing.

This is innovative research, and the application of smartphones in this way is likely to be employed in future studies. However, the method by which the participants were recruited meant that they were likely to know the rationale behind the study, which may have affected their responses. The research was also limited to iphone users, and so may not be representative of the population as a whole.

The study is continuing should anyone wish to take part in it. People may want to take this research in the good-natured spirit in which it is intended, rather than being genuinely concerned about how their mind wandering affects their happiness.

Where did the story come from?

The study was carried out by researchers from Harvard University. The funding source for this research was not stated. The study was published in the (peer-reviewed) journal Science.

The research was covered accurately by the Daily Mail and The Guardian. However, both newspapers could have paid more attention to how the participants were recruited to the study and the bias that may have arisen from this.

What kind of research was this?

The researchers say that humans are the only animal to spend a lot of time “thinking about what’s not going on around them, contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future or may not happen at all”. They say that “many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering”. In this cross-sectional study, they aimed to investigate whether people who let their mind wander were less happy than those who “lived in the moment”.

To answer this question, the researchers opted to carry out what they called ‘experience sampling’, which involves contacting people as they engage in everyday activities and asking about their thoughts, feelings and actions at that moment. They consider this to be the most reliable method for investigating real-world emotion, and a better method than asking how people felt about an event in the past which they may not be able to recall accurately. However, this sort of sampling can be unfeasible, especially if many people need to be surveyed.

The researchers therefore made an application on the iPhone, which contacted participants at random times throughout the day to ask about their mood and activities. This allowed them to collect data from a large sample of people.

What did the research involve?

The participants volunteered online by signing up at the researcher’s website, which had received national press coverage. A total of 2,250 adults signed up, 59% of whom were men and 74% were living in the US. All participants were over 18 with an average age of 34.

The participants were asked the times at which they woke up and went to sleep, and how many times they would be willing to receive a sample request (between one and three times a day). A computer program generated random times for the participants to be contacted each day, and given a selection from a variety of mood and activity assessment questions.

For example, participants were asked, ‘How are you feeling right now?’, to which they answered by giving a rating on a sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100). The participants were also asked, ‘What are you doing right now?’ and chose from a list of 22 activities such as working, watching TV or talking. They were also asked a mind-wandering question, ‘Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?’. Possible answers were: No; Yes, something pleasant; Yes, something neutral or Yes, something unpleasant. Out of an average of 50 requests. the participants answered 83%.

What were the basic results?

The researchers found that the participant’s minds wandered frequently, and reported that their mind was wandering 47% of the time they were contacted.

When the 22 activities were analysed separately there was a range in the proportion of participants that reported their mind wandering across the activities. However, for the majority of the activities at least 30% of the participants were not focussed on the task. The only activity in which over 70% of the participants were entirely focussed when contacted was making love.

The researchers used a statistical technique called multilevel regression to see whether there was an association between mind wandering and happiness. They found that when people said that their mind was wandering, they also said that they were less happy. People’s minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (43% of samples) than unpleasant (27%) or neutral topics (31%).

The researchers found that when people were thinking about pleasant topics they were no happier than if they were concentrating on the activity in hand. However, if their mind had strayed to neutral or negative thoughts, they reported that they were less happy than people whose mind had not wandered.

There was variation in how happy each different activity made each participant and also variation in how happy an activity made one participant compared to another participant. However if a participants mind was wandering, this had a more variable influence on their overall happiness compared to the activity they were doing.

How did the researchers interpret the results?

The researchers conclude, “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind”.

They say that there are evolutionary advantages to mind wandering, such as allowing people to learn, reason and plan, but that the “ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost”.

Conclusion

This research developed a method for ‘real-time sampling’ a large number of people’s moods using smart phone technology. This new approach may be of great interest to other researchers and could prove to be a valuable technique for answering other questions.

This study may have found an association between reported happiness ‘in the moment’ and mind-wandering, but it does not show that people who spend most of their time daydreaming are less happy overall than people who spend more time focussed on what they’re doing.

The real-time sampling approach was well thought out but there are several limitations to this research that may affect how well it applies to the population as a whole. Firstly, the participants were all recruited through the research group’s web page, and this may have biased the type of person who participated. For example, people who had an interest in the philosophy of living in the moment may have been more likely to participate.

The study also received national press coverage in the US, though it is not clear whether this coverage would have revealed what the study was about. If participants know what the researchers are interested in, this can affect how they respond.

Lastly, to take part, participants had to possess an iphone, and people who own these devices may differ in personality and socioeconomic background from the general population. One example of this is that the average age of the participants was 34, which is lower than if the sample had been representative of the age range of the general population.

The study is continuing should anyone wish to take part in it. People may want to take this research in the good-natured spirit in which it is intended, rather than being genuinely concerned about how their mind wandering affects their happiness.

Friday, November 05, 2010

The terminally ill Christopher Hitchens refuses to embrace the easy consolation of religion. He is an example to us all.

In his beautiful book The Needs of Strangers, Michael Ignatieff tells the story of the death of the sceptical philosopher David Hume. Ignatieff describes James Boswell sitting aghast at Hume’s bedside as the great rationalist refuses, even at his very last, to take the consolation on offer from divinity. Hume dies a death with no illusions and no regrets. Ignatieff points out that this is a death of which few of us are now capable. In secular societies we have lost Boswell’s religious certainty without acquiring Hume’s equanimity. We still have the terror but no longer the consolation.

On November 26, in Ignatieff’s home city of Toronto, Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens will debate whether religion is a force for peace or for conflict. The event is lent extra gravity, of course, because Hitchens, 61, had cancer of the oesophagus diagnosed on June 30. His chance of recovery is, alas, slight.

But we are witnessing, as Hitchens argues and writes his way towards the darkness, a modern equivalent of the death of Hume. Hitchens is dying according to his atheism: stoically, far from the fold of religious consolation.

In an interview with CNN, Hitchens was clear in his response to those of the faithful who, praying on his behalf, hope for a death-bed conversion: “I can tell you: not while I’m lucid, no.”

Then, in a remarkable essay in Vanity Fair on his intimation of mortality, Hitchens, as he does so often, made the killer point: “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’, the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, Why not?’”

If Michael Ignatieff, now the leader of the Canadian Liberal Party, were to attend the debate in Toronto, he could remind the audience that Humean stoicism in the face of the enemy is incredibly rare. At a recent funeral of a relative I said, because he had been a geologist, that we all go to the rocks and the soil in the end. Yet I knew at the time that was hardly the consolation that people were seeking. For those who still have religious certainty there is a whole armoury of gone-to-a-better-place comforts.

But in a country where humanist funerals doubled in the late 1990s and then rose a further 150 per cent in the first decade of the new century, this is not available. We retain the funeral rites but we have become distanced from their content.

Who among the congregation knew that the flowers were once thought to gain favour with the spirit of the departed? At the wake, over the drinks and the sausage rolls with relatives we only see when we gather to count the family down, who knew we were there to keep watch, in the hope that life would return? Draped in black as we were, was anyone aware that this pagan garb was designed to hide our identities from avenging spirits?

There was a consoling beauty in the hymns, although even Cwm Rhondda doesn’t help that much if you believe, as Christopher Hitchens does and as I do, that it’s the rocks and the soil and nowhere better.

Soon, unless there is a materialist miracle, Christopher Hitchens will be heading underground too. And that fact needs to be marked because, through 40 years as a prolific essayist, Hitchens has been exactly the lucid, sceptical witness of which we always have too few. He has set out the case for atheism, with verve and in detail, in the polemic god is Not Great.

But it is actually Hitchens’ late conversion to scepticism in politics that has inspired the scorn of former comrades on the Left. Hitchens, they say, has turned from the idealistic Left to the neo- conservative Right. The most obvious manifestation of this apostasy is his characterstically voluble support for the War on Terror and action in Iraq. Hitchens needs no defence from anyone else but, as it happens, his support for the war in Iraq is entirely consistent with his previous support for the Falklands war and for American intervention in Bosnia. On each occasion he has taken sides against fascism in its various guises. As he said in 2002: “I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials.” The better critique of Hitchens is not that he has betrayed the cause. It is that, much like his Toronto adversary Tony Blair, his account of global religious conflict reduces a complex problem to a Manichean one. But it is hard to repulse the insinuating thought: what if he’s right? Hitchens has, indeed, moved. He has given up a belief in a political utopia and replaced it with the insight that the combination of capitalism with liberal democracy needs to be cherished and defended. If only Hitchens had a full term to pursue this belief. As he says in Love, Poverty and War: “It is civilisation and pluralism and secularism that need pitiless and unapologetic fighters.” The shame is that it took until the end of his memoirs, which will be in turn too close to the end of his life, before Hitchens stumbled on what he calls his “Hitch-22”: that we must commit to our beliefs while remaining sceptical about those who are fired by certainty. The old comrades simply cannot fathom that acquiring scepticism in politics, and in the process throwing off defunct beliefs, is the same process as acquiring wisdom.

The books that will now not be written by this great writer at the height of his power are a sorry loss. For it was Christopher Hitchens who taught me about the genius of George Orwell and the moral culpability of Henry Kissinger. It was Christopher Hitchens who hardened and exemplified my low view of Bill Clinton and who skewered the saintly reputation of the “Papa Doc” Duvalier supporter, Mother Teresa. And in the literary world it was Christopher Hitchens who did what Tony Blair did in politics, and put into passionate prose the stakes that were raised after September 11, 2001. Reading the collected essays again in preparation for this piece, I learnt something on every page. If you have not read them, I urge you to do so. The most fitting testimonial is surely to read the work because it is there, in the work, that you find, as Nabokov says, the only immortality that you and I will share: the refuge of art.

Then we can wonder at the fact that, after all the lessons that Hitchens has taught us on the page, he is now conducting, before the curtain call, a lesson that most of us have no idea if we can learn. He is teaching us how to die a stoical death.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Oxford philosopher and transhumanist Nick Bostrom examines the future of humankind and asks whether we might alter the fundamental nature of humanity to solve our most intrinsic problems.

I want to talk today about -- I've been asked to take a long view, and I'm going to tell you what I think are the three biggest problems for humanity from this long point of view. Some of these have already been touched upon by other speakers, which is encouraging. It seems that there's not just one person who thinks that these problems are important.

The first is -- death is a big problem. If you look at the statistics, the odds are not very favorable to us. So far, most people who have lived, have also died. Roughly 90 percent of everybody who has been alive has died by now. So the annual death rate adds up to 150,000 -- sorry, the daily death rate -- 150,000 people per day, which is a huge number by any standard. The annual death rate, then, becomes 56 million. If we just look at the single, biggest cause of death -- aging -- it accounts for roughly two-thirds of all human people who die. That adds up to an annual death toll of greater than the population of Canada. Sometimes, we don't see a problem because either it's too familiar, or it's too big. Can't see it because it's too big. I think death might be both too familiar and too big for most people to see it as a problem.

Once you think about it, you see this is not statistical points. These are -- let's see, how far have I talked? I've talked for three minutes. So that would be, roughly, 324 people have died since I've begun speaking. People like -- it's roughly the population in this room has just died. Now, the human cost of that is obvious. Once you start to think about it -- the suffering, the loss -- it's also, economically, enormously wasteful. I just look at the information, and knowledge, and experience that is lost due to natural causes of death in general, and aging, in particular.

Suppose we approximated one person with one book? Now, of course, this is an under-estimation. A person's lifetime of learning and experience is a lot more than you could put into a single book. But let's suppose we did this. 52 million people die of natural causes each year corresponds, then, to 52 million volumes destroyed. Library of Congress holds 18 million volumes. We are upset about the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It's one of the great cultural tragedies that we remember, even today. But this is the equivalent of three Libraries of Congress -- burnt down, forever lost -- each year.

So that's the first big problem. And I wish Godspeed to Aubrey de Grey, and other people like him, to try to do something about this as soon as possible. Existential risk -- the second big problem. Existential risk is a threat to human survival, or to the long-term potential of our species. Now, why do I say that this is a big problem? Well, let's first look at the probability -- and this is very difficult to estimate -- but there have been only four studies on this in recent years, which is surprising. You would think that it would be of some interest to try to find out more about this given that the stakes are so big, but it's a very neglected area.

But there have been four studies -- one by John Lesley, wrote a book on this. He estimated a probability that we will fail to survive the current century -- 50 percent. Similarly, the Astronomer Royal, whom we heard speak yesterday, also has a 50 percent probability estimate. Another author doesn't give any numerical estimate, but says the probability is significant that it will fail. I wrote a long paper on this. I said assigning a less than 20 percent probability would be a mistake in light of the current evidence we have. Now, the exact figures here, we should take with a big grain of salt, but there seems to be a consensus that the risk is substantial. Everybody who has looked at this and studied it, agrees.

Now, if we think about what just reducing the probability of human extinction by just one percentage point -- not very much -- so that's equivalent to 60 million lives saved, if we just count the currently living people, the current generation. Now one percent of six billion people is equivalent to 60 million. So that's a large number. If we were to take into account future generations that will never come into existence if we blow ourselves up, then the figure becomes astronomical. If we could, now, eventually, colonize a chunk of the universe -- the Virgo supercluster -- maybe it will take us 100 million years to get there, but if we go extinct we never will. Then, even a one percentage point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number -- 10 to the power of 32.

So if you take into account future generations as much as our own, every other moral imperative of philanthropic cost just becomes irrelevant. The only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk because even the tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other benefit you could hope to achieve. And even if you just look at the current people, and ignore the potential that would be lost if we went extinct, it would still have a high priority. Now, let me spend the rest of my time on the third big problem, because it's more subtle and perhaps difficult to grasp. Think about some time in your life -- some people might never have experienced -- but some people, there are just those moments that you have experienced where life was fantastic.

It might have been at the moment of some great, creative inspiration you might have had when you just entered this flow stage. Or when you understood something you had never done before. Or perhaps in the ecstasy of romantic love. Or an aesthetic experience -- a sunset or a great piece of art. Every once in a while we have these moments, and we realize just how good life can be when it's at its best. And you wonder why can't it be like that all the time? You just want to cling on to this. And then, of course, it drifts back into ordinary life and the memory fades. And it's really difficult to recall, in a normal frame of mind, just how good life can be at its best. Or how bad it can be at its worst.

The third big problem is that life isn't usually as wonderful as it could be. I think that's a big, big problem. It's easy to say what we don't want. Here are a number of things that we don't want -- illness, involuntary death, unnecessary suffering, cruelty, stunted growth, memory loss, ignorance, absence of creativity. Suppose we fixed these things -- we did something about all of these. We were very successful. We got rid of all of these things. We might end up with something like this. Which is -- I mean, it's a heck of a lot better than that. I mean, but is this really the best if -- we can dream of? Is this the best we can do?

Or is it possible to find something a little bit more inspiring to work towards? And if we think about this, I think it's very clear that there are ways in which we could change things, not just by eliminating negatives, but adding positives. On my wish list, at least, would be -- much longer, healthier lives, greater subjective well-being, enhanced cognitive capacities, more knowledge and understanding, unlimited opportunity for personal growth beyond our current biological limits, better relationships, an unbounded potential for spiritual, moral and intellectual development.

If we want to achieve this what, in the world, would have to change? And this is the answer -- we would have to change. Not just the world around us, but we, ourselves. Not just the way we think about the world, but the way we are -- our very biology. Human nature would have to change. Now, when we think about changing human nature, the first thing that comes to mind are these human modification technologies -- growth hormone therapy, cosmetic surgery, stimulants like Ritalin, Adderall, anti-depressants, anabolic steroids, artificial hearts. It's a pretty pathetic list. They do great things for a few people who suffer from some specific condition. But for most people, they don't really transform what it is to be human. And they also all seem a little bit -- most people have this instinct that, well, sure, there needs to be anti-depressants for the really depressed people. But there's a kind of queasiness that these are unnatural in some way.

It's worth recalling that there are a lot of other modification technologies and enhancement technologies that we use. We have skin enhancements, clothing. As far as I can see, all of you are users of this enhancement technology in this room, so that's a great thing. Mood modifiers have been used from time immemorial -- caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, immune system enhancement, vision enhancement, anesthetics. We take that very much for granted, but just think about how great progress that is -- like, having an operation before anesthetics was not fun. Contraceptives, cosmetics and brain reprogramming techniques -- that sounds ominous.

But the distinction between what is a technology -- a gadget would be the archetype -- and other ways of changing and rewriting human nature is quite subtle. So if you think about what it means to learn arithmetic or to learn to read, you're actually, literally rewriting your own brain. You're changing the micro-structure of your brain as you go along. So in a broad sense, we don't need to think about technology as only little gadgets, like these things here. But even institutions and techniques, psychological methods and so forth. Forms of organization can have a profound impact on human nature.

Looking ahead, there is a range of technologies that are almost certain to be developed sooner or later. We are very ignorant about what the time scale for these things are, but they all are consistent with everything we know about physical laws, laws of chemistry, et cetera. It's possible to assume, setting aside a possibility of catastrophe, sooner or later we will develop all of these. And even just a couple of these would be enough to transform the human condition.

So let's look at some of the dimensions of human nature that seem to leave room for improvement. Health span is a big and urgent thing, because if you're not alive, then all the other things will be to little avail. Intellectual capacity -- let's take that box, which falls into a lot of different sub-categories -- memory, concentration, mental energy, intelligence, empathy. These are really great things. Part of the reason why we value these traits is that they make us better at competing with other people -- they're positional goods. But part of the reason -- and that's the reason why we have ethical ground for pursuing these -- is that they're also intrinsically valuable. It's just better to be able to understand more of the world around you and the people that you are communicating with, and to remember what you have learned. Modalities and special faculties. Now, the human mind is not a single unitary information processor, but it has a lot of different, special, evolved modules that do specific things for us. If you think about what we normally take as giving life a lot of its meaning -- music, humor, eroticism, spirituality, aesthetics, nurturing and caring, gossip, chatting with people.

All of these, very likely, are enabled by a special circuitry that we humans have, but that you could have another intelligent life form that lacks these. We're just lucky that we have the requisite neural machinery to process music and to appreciate it and to enjoy it. All of these would enable, in principle -- be amenable to enhancement. Some people have a better musical ability and ability to appreciate music than others have. It's also interesting to think about what other things are -- so if these all enabled great values, why should we think that evolution has happened to provide us with all the modalities we would need to engage with other values that there might be?

Imagine a species that just didn't have this neural machinery for processing music. And they would just stare at us with bafflement when we spend time listening to a beautiful performance, like the one we just heard -- because of people making stupid movements. And they would be really irritated and wouldn't see what we were up to. But maybe they have another faculty, something else that would seem equally irrational to us, but they actually tap into some great possible value there. But we are just literally deaf to that kind of value. So we could think of adding on different, new sensory capacities and mental faculties. Bodily functionality and morphology and affective self-control. Greater subjective well-being. Be able to switch between relaxation and activity -- being able to go slow when you need to do that, and to speed up. Able to switch back and forth more easily would be a neat thing to be able to do -- easier to achieve the flow state, when you're totally immersed in something you are doing. Conscientiousness and sympathy. The ability to -- it's another interesting application that would have large social ramification problems. If you could actually choose to preserve your romantic attachments to one person, undiminished through time, so that wouldn't have to -- love would never have to fade if you didn't want it to. That's probably not all that difficult. It might just be a simple hormone or something that could do this.

It's been done in voles. You can engineer a prairie vole to become monogamous when it's naturally polygamous. It's just a single gene. Might be more complicated in humans, but perhaps not that much. This is the last picture that I want to -- now we've got to use the laser pointer. A possible mode of being here would be a way of life -- a way of being, experiencing, thinking, seeing, interacting with the world. Down here in this little corner, here, we have the little sub-space of this larger space that is accessible to human beings -- beings with our biological capacities. It's a part of the space that's accessible to animals -- since we are animals, we are a sub-set of that.

And then you can imagine some enhancements of human capacities. There would be different modes of being you could experience if you were able to stay alive for, say 200 years. Then you could live sorts of lives and accumulate wisdoms that are just not possible for humans as we currently are. So then, you move off to this larger sphere of human plus, and you could continue that process and eventually explore a lot of this larger space of possible modes of being.

Now, why is that a good thing to do? Well, we know already that in this little human circle there, there are these enormously wonderful and worthwhile modes of being -- human life at its best is wonderful. We have no reason to believe that within this much larger space there would not also be extremely worthwhile modes of being. Perhaps ones that would be way beyond our wildest ability, even to imagine or dream about. And so, to fix this third problem, I think we need -- slowly, carefully, with ethical wisdom and restraint -- develop the means that enable us to go out in this larger space and explore it. And find the great values that might hide there. Thanks.

Secularism is unfairly characterised and attacked by religious leaders as a way of seeking to protect their privileges.

Secularism is not atheism (lack of belief in God) and nor is it humanism (a nonreligious belief system). It is a political movement seeking specific policy end-points. Many secularists are religious and many religious people – recognising the value of keeping government and religion separate – are secular.

Secularism seeks to defend the absolute freedom of religious and other belief, seeks to maximise freedom of religious and other expression and protect the right to manifest religious belief insofar as it does not impinge disproportionately on the rights and freedoms of others. This is essentially a summary of article 9 of the European convention on human rights. In addition secularism aims to end religious privileges or persecutions and to fully separate the state from religion which is a necessary means to that end.

A manifesto for secularist change would look like this:

1. Protect free religious expression that does not directly incite violence or crimes against others or publicly and directly cause someone distress or alarm.

This is why secularists:

• Led the battle against Tony Blair's over-broad religious hatred bill working alongside some religious people who wanted the freedom to attack other religions and against some religious organisations.• Achieved a singular success with the abolition of EnglishChristian-only blasphemy laws.• Seek to abolish public order offences that lead the police to question religious people for speaking their minds, short of direct abuse of someone else.• Oppose a defamation of religion law that has been proposed at the UN by some Muslim-majority states.• Oppose burqa bans except where it is necessary for security, safety or effective delivery of public services• Support the right of Muslims to build mosques subject to normal planning rules

2. End discrimination against nonreligious belief systems or organisations by ending their exclusion from:

• Protected religious broadcasting slots.• Committees that draw up the syllabus for religious studies.• Bodies that advise the government on matters relating to religion.

3. End unjustified religious discrimination by:

• Stopping faith schools from sacking or rejecting a teacher based on his/her religion or marital status.• Preventing state-funded faiths schools from discriminating against, and segregating, children on religious grounds.• Allowing royals to marry Catholics by amending the anti-Catholic Act of Settlement.

4. Where religious organisations join others in delivering public services, ensure they do so without:

• Discriminating against their employees.• Withholding services from users on religious or sexual grounds.• Proselytising when delivering that service.

5. Limit the right of religious people delivering public services (for example marriage registrars, judges, pharmacists, or care workers) to conscientiously object to carrying out lawful parts of their job to rare and specific exemptions (eg doctors and abortion) agreed by parliament.

6. Allow for reasonable adjustment to cater for religious practice in employment or in facilities (eg Sikh turbans in the police force, the hijab or kara in uniform policies, and prayer facilities in the workplace) but not to extend this to a blanket religious exemption based on subjective feelings, nor to impose religious practice on nonbelievers.

7. Cease religious inculcation by the state by ending compulsory worship in schools and making religious education the study of what religions and other belief systems believe, rather than instruction in what to believe.

8. Disconnect religion from the state by:

• Disestablishing the Church of England.• Ending prayer in the parliamentary or council chamber.• Abolishing bishops automatically sitting in the House of Lords. We are the only country outside Iran to have reserved seats in parliament for clerics. Religious people can and do stand for election in the normal way.

9. Resist the imposition of parallel legal systems based on scripture, or the legal presumption that religious people are any more or less moral than nonbelievers.

10. Work to end segregation of people based on religious dividing lines.

None of this involves anything to do with doctrinal matters such as women bishops, gay priests or Latin masses, which are matters for religions. Nor does it involve the banning of religious opinion from the public square.

None of it engages with what families get up to in their home, or religious leaders within their own families.

If you agree with all the above, while you may be an ardent secularist, you are in no way "militant" or "aggressive". If you agree with only most of that manifesto, you may well be a vicar. If you oppose it all then you are probably archbishop material.

The worst excesses carried out in the name of secularism – neither of which are supported by UK secularists – involve a proposed burqa ban in France and bans on religious dress in Turkish universities. They are wrong but they hardly rank compared to what is carried out by religious regimes.